by Leah Franqui
Her phone buzzed. A text from Max again. Always Max. Rebecca sighed, exhausted with packing and worrying, and did a stupid thing. She responded.
Twenty minutes later, she looked at the ice melting in her whiskey with an expression that was, she could feel, quickly turning from manufactured interest to thinly veiled disgust. The knots in her back were throbbing now, tightening her neck under the still-prickling skin. Next to her, his body thrumming with energy, Max was vibrating with eager need. He touched her constantly, rubbing her arm and smoothing his fingers along the small of her back, laying claim to her in little ways. His hands felt cloying, sticky with eagerness.
She swallowed the watery whiskey in one mouthful and motioned for another.
“That’s my girl.”
She almost visibly winced, but caught herself in time and transformed the motion into the post-drink shudder so favored by college students.
“It’s good whiskey, right?”
It was fine, a brand she’d had many times before Max and would have many times after him. She smiled and nodded, though, her eyes the right degree of wide, her smile the right shades of grateful and admiring.
She slipped back into the person who had so entranced this stupid boy. Whiskey had loosened him, made his need for her even keener and more painfully clear. The part of her brain that always stayed outside of any role she played observed his slackened mouth and brightened eyes with dull anticipation. He was predictable, and she scolded him for his lack of showmanship. He opened his mouth to speak and she knew what would emerge, and began preparing her response.
“Where have you been? I missed you. You avoiding me?”
There it was, her cue. She smiled gently, projecting bohemian busy, the flaky but fascinating girl he wanted her to be.
“I’m so sorry, Max, things have just been crazy. I kept wishing I could see you but I didn’t want to involve you in my whirlwind. I just wanted to get through it all and see you on the other side. You know?”
Inwardly she frowned. Had she gone too far? But then he smiled, content, accepting happily that she was the kind of girl who contained her problems, who didn’t lean, depend, cling, or demand. Rebecca read this in his face and accepted her new whiskey from the bartender with a nod.
She would sleep with him tonight. The knowledge resigned her, robbing her of some of the sparkle that pretending to be someone else had given her. She drank her whiskey and smiled, letting her eyes go soft and liquid in the low light and thinking of the luggage in her apartment and the places she would be going soon.
Later, in his apartment, she lay underneath him as he pumped into her, moving her body, trying to find something for herself in the act, a tremor of pleasure, something to make her feel like she was really there. She clenched her trembling hands in the sheet and waited for him to finish.
When he fell asleep she went home. The trip would begin in the morning. She was grateful now for the hotel, though she had resented it just hours before. It would be good, she thought, to get away and leave this person behind. She didn’t know whether she meant Max or herself.
15
Pival didn’t sleep the night before her flight to America. She was haunted by the fear that she would oversleep and miss her flight, coupled with the vague suspicion that the maids would refuse to wake her. She imagined the servants running around the house turning all the clocks back and forward so that Pival would be confused but then dismissed the thought, reminding herself that most of them were far too lazy for that. The most likely to do it would be Tanvi, and she couldn’t tell time.
Nevertheless, her fantasies could not be banished. They morphed into other things, and she imagined crowds of Sengupta aunties and uncles barricading the doors, screaming at her and shaming her for her disrespect to the memory of their beloved Ram. She imagined a vision of Ram himself, in the form of an incarnation of Vishnu, emerging from the heavens, his hand raised up to keep her from her flight, his crown blinding her with its brilliance, forcing her body into a crouched bow on the ground. Another Ram sprang forth and began to insult her, calling her a weak little mouse, a nothing. She had heard the words so often toward the end of his life that she had no trouble remembering them now, giving this ghost-fantasy the worst of them, the ones that would emerge from Ram’s mouth after late nights at his club when he would come home smelling like alcohol and angry that she still existed. He would burst into her room on those nights, wild-eyed and rough, railing at her as she huddled beneath her quilts and coverlets, calling her a curse, blaming her for everything wrong, telling her the world would be better without her in it. Strange, then, that he had been the first to die.
It hadn’t always been that way, she reminded herself. Their marriage had become that only after they found out about Rahi, after Rahi called them and told them what he was.
Ram had left the house as soon as the words were out of Rahi’s mouth, throwing the phone at her, leaving Pival to sob against its hard plastic. He came back at five in the morning, reeking of alcohol and towering in his rage. He had broken everything in Pival’s room except the bed, and slurred at her that their son’s deficiencies and perversions were her fault, that she was a black smear on the world for allowing such a piece of filth to emerge from her body. He told her that she had ruined him, destroyed their son, perverted him, that her influence and their closeness had made their son the disgusting thing he now claimed to be. Pival kept waiting for Ram to hit her, until he left and she realized she wasn’t worth the effort. The next morning Ram delivered a stiff apology and claimed to have no memory of whatever he’d done or said. Pival nodded weakly and let every word play over and over in her head until they formed a barrier around her heart. And in her mind she thanked him, for teaching her to be strong.
Ram had told her that Rahi was not welcome in their home, that he was not their son any longer. She had not known how to disobey him, not understood what she could do, so she had agreed by not disagreeing. Pival had not spoken to Rahi since. And that was her fault, she knew. But she could fix that, now, once she got there. She had exiled her own son. She could talk to Rahi, conversing with him in her mind in every city she visited; she could understand his life by understanding the country she had lost him to; she could find him, if he was alive, and bring him back with her. She could heal him, restore him to his unperverted self. She knew she could. She just had to make it to the flight.
At three in the morning Pival got up from her bed and checked for the thousandth time that she had everything she needed. Her bags were in order; her passport was right there in her purse, along with her wallet, stuffed with American currency, and a book of poetry by the Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore. She had never read his work before. Everyone else she knew had, and now she couldn’t say anything, couldn’t admit her ignorance. His songs and poems were everywhere—she knew the verses to a few—but she had never sat down and read anything he had actually written. She didn’t know if Ram had, either. It was just one of those things he had insisted on having in the house and displaying when guests came, a declaration, Look, we are all Bengali, we are all well-read, aren’t you impressed? Pival didn’t think it meant anything if you hadn’t actually read the work. For all his anti-British declarations, Ram only really enjoyed Western spy novels, his secret shame. But she would take this on her trip, as a genuine act of Bengali pride, and see what she thought. She should read one of the books she had lived with before she died.
She performed her morning puja in her pajamas, praying to the goddess Durga first, apologizing for missing her festival. She begged each of the gods in front of her, Lakshmi, Parvati, Vishnu, Ganesh, Krishna, Kali, for protection, for care and guidance. She did not apologize to them, nor did she try to explain her journey. She simply asked them for their help and thanked them for their kindness. From her purse she drew out a photograph, crumpled and creased. It was a photo of Rahi, the only one she had for herself. Ram had destroyed all the others in a small bonfire in their courtyard, ordering a we
eping Tanvi to find any reminders of their son and bring them to be incinerated. Tanvi might have cried but she did it anyway, and Pival would never forgive her for that. She had managed to save two photographs, the family portrait with Rahi as a baby that now hung in her room—she argued that it would cause comment and be a bad omen to destroy a photo of their entire extended family—and one she’d concealed from Tanvi and Ram both, a snapshot Rahi had sent her from America, in which he looked calm and so happy.
She placed his image next to Ganesh and prayed to them both, both the sons of fathers eager to reject them. She then slipped the photograph back into her purse, with more reverence than she could give any god. Whoever the photographer was, Rahi must have loved him, for he looked at the camera with such adoration in his eyes. Pival felt a sudden rage at this person for owning even an iota of her son’s affection, and told herself that Rahi was looking at her instead.
16
Waiting for his weekends with Bhim transformed Jake from a solemn landscape architect into a giddy teenager. He hadn’t even felt like this when he was a teenager, he realized, grinning as he broke his pencil lead for the fifth consecutive time, ruining his drafting. He reached for another and simultaneously checked his phone. There was no new text or email, but that was all right, he told himself, Bhim was busy. He would see him soon, in two weeks, as they had agreed. He had wished Bhim a pleasant flight a full week ago, dropping him off at the airport on his way to work, and he had spent the rest of the ride alternately beaming and on the verge of tears. He had never felt this mix of elation and despair, felt so addicted to someone else’s skin and scent and voice. In the week that followed he felt like he was going through a mental breakdown at least four times a day, with his mood shifting from happiness to anxiety to lust to sadness. He talked to Bhim daily, before bed, and was tormented with dreams of him until the morning. His work had always distracted him from any consuming feeling, but now that respite was gone, and he could only see the curves and angles of Bhim’s body in his slide rule.
He stood up, shaking out his cramping hands and looking dolefully at his botched plans. He had, he realized, drawn Bhim’s face into a model of a tree. He traced it with his finger, blurring the pencil strokes.
“Who is she?” Morgan, one of the partners, was standing in Jake’s doorway, observing his distraction with a faint smile.
Jake grimaced. “He,” he said firmly. Morgan was a senior partner in his seventies, and he knew that Jake was gay but continued to ask him about the women in his life. Jake knew that the man didn’t mean anything by it, that he was just one of those people who couldn’t get their head around changing the pronoun, but Jake corrected him every time.
“He, she. You’re running around like a putz, Jake. What is that? Some kind of sculpture garden? Modern art?” Morgan gestured to the garden plan, which did look like something more for a museum than the private home of tax accountants to the stars.
“I apologize, I’ve been distracted,” Jake stiffly said, rolling up the tracing paper. “I’ll redo this, I don’t mind staying late.”
“You could stay all night, I don’t think you’ll do better. You can’t think with two parts of your body at once,” Morgan wryly observed. “Go home, Schwartz.”
Morgan was in coach mode, revved up to dispense advice. Jake sighed and shrugged, but he was happy to leave. The office, which had long been his sanctuary, had become claustrophobic. On the way out the door he began Googling flights to San Francisco, calculating how many sick days he had, wondering if he could afford to leave tonight, to take the rest of the week off. He turned back around and walked into the office, catching Morgan as the older man was sitting down to look over blueprints of a new community center, their one charity project amid all their high-profile work.
“I’m going to be out for the rest of the week,” Jake announced.
“Must be quite a boy,” Morgan said, surprising him with the appropriate gender.
“I think so,” Jake said, but his tone must have conveyed something of his longing, because Morgan looked almost embarrassed, and he looked down from Jake’s grinning face, sorting the papers on his desk with lined and worn hands. Morgan had the hands of a master builder, scarred and ink stained, which always looked strange to Jake as they emerged from his expensive shirts and well-tailored suits.
“I see. Well. Be in on Monday, and I want a better plan for the Sykeses’ garden by Tuesday. Not everyone wants to look out on your boyfriend’s face in their trees every morning, understand?”
Jake saluted. He wasn’t offended. He ceased to care about Morgan as soon as he was out the door. Now it was only about the destination, the person he would see in Berkeley, the person he needed to be near. Two weeks was too long. He drove straight to the airport and boarded the first flight he could. He had nothing with him but his work bag, a leather messenger stuffed with notebooks and gum. He read the in-flight magazine cover to cover twice and tried to contain his excitement, the rolling pit of his stomach that worried about what might happen when he arrived. Would Bhim be excited? He had quietly admitted that he missed Jake on the phone the night before, and Bhim had tried to cover it with a laugh. Surely he would be happy?
He arrived at the airport and called Bhim, his phone battery dangerously low.
“I’m here,” he said, tentative.
“Everyone is somewhere,” Bhim replied, playful, not understanding.
“I’m in San Francisco,” Jake said, holding his breath. There was a long silence.
“Why?”
Jake felt as though he had been punched in the stomach. “I came to see you.”
“We said in two weeks—”
“I couldn’t wait,” Jake said, fighting to keep his voice from wavering. He would not apologize for this, for wanting something and trying to have it. There was more silence. Then, a sigh. Jake wondered if this was it, if it ended here before it had begun.
“I’m glad,” Bhim said simply, and Jake could hear it in his voice now, pure happiness, echoing Jake’s own. “When will you be in Berkeley?”
“Soon.”
“Good.” And Bhim gave him the address, and hung up the phone. Jake did not remember the rest of the cab ride, which was long and horribly expensive. He only remembered arriving and being in Bhim’s arms as soon as they had entered his tiny apartment, a cramped and messy space that Jake barely registered before their clothing was off and their bodies were open to each other. Bhim held him like a lifeline, drinking him in, and as they kissed Bhim whispered I missed you into Jake’s skin, as if he could infuse his pores with gratitude.
But afterward when Jake, tentative and a little self-conscious after his big sitcom romantic gesture, asked Bhim if he was happy that Jake had come, almost as a joke, Bhim said of course, lightly, without any weight behind it, and told him it was time to sleep.
The next morning he watched Bhim shave with a straight razor, the first time he had ever seen anyone do that. His father, growing up, had tamed his bushy, rough hair with an electric razor, and when it had come time for Jake to begin shaving he had found that the genes for his mother’s fair, thin locks had been outmatched by his father’s Semitic ones, and he too would have to shave daily to avoid looking like a lumberjack. He remembered his father singing to his little black hairs as they rinsed down the drain, “Run free, into the sea, a little piece of me, run free!” He could hear it even now when he shaved.
It took eight more weekends, stretched over six more months, before Bhim would consent to meet Jake’s father. Jake tried hard not to be hurt by this. He returned to Los Angeles, corrected the Sykeses’ mangled garden plans, and learned to remain focused at work once again. He tried to contain his joy for the conversations he and Bhim shared over the phone, and the precious hours they had together once or twice a month, but it was difficult not to feel that Bhim did not care enough about his life, did not really want to be a part of it, no matter how often Bhim insisted that he did. He knew that Bhim was afraid, that Bhim
did not really believe anyone could truly find their relationship acceptable, especially Jake’s father.
Bhim rarely mentioned his own family, or his childhood, or anything that had happened before California. It was as if he had been born on a plane and walked off fully formed, without a past. Jake tried to compensate by telling story after story about his parents, his hippie mother, his East Coast intellectual father, his “broken home,” his college years, anything he could think of, but while Bhim drank them up like wine, asking copious questions, remembering every detail months later, he didn’t respond with similar memories.
Bhim was good with people, and people liked Bhim, but there was no one close to him. Partly that made Jake feel special, and partly it troubled him. Jake would have worried about the apparent emptiness of Bhim’s life, but wherever there may have been a gap, Bhim filled it with work. Jake understood, since this was the bedrock upon which most of their commonality stood. They both were passionate about what they did.
If Bhim’s work had seemed boring to other people, it had always fascinated Jake even as the conversations about mollusks and mud qualities confused him. Likewise, Bhim enjoyed Jake’s long lectures on light and space, on man’s relationship to architecture and to the land. Wasn’t Bhim himself immersed in the study of how these snails made their own homes, created a space for themselves to shield their tender bodies from the harsh world? Jake had asked once if he was the snail, building spaces to shelter himself and others, re-creating the world around him with structure and artificial boundaries, if his buildings and gardens were like shells. Bhim had replied of course, you are just like the snail, and that is why I must study you! And he had spent his time discovering Jake’s body like a scientist, testing each part until neither of them could stand the exploration.